A federal judge in Denver will decide over the next couple of days whether the self-proclaimed Planned Parenthood shooter should be forcibly medicated.

Robert Dear Jr. is accused of driving two hours from the town of Hartsel to the Planned Parenthood on Centennial Boulevard in Colorado Springs on Nov. 27, 2015, with the intention of “waging war” on the clinic.

Once there, he allegedly shot at the people parked next to his truck and then forced his way into the clinic; for the next five hours, the accused allegedly traded fire with police while barricading himself inside the building. When the suspect was finally detained, an Iraq War veteran, a young mother from Hawaii, and a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs police officer were dead and nine others including four law enforcement officers were wounded.

Authorities said the gunman fired 198 bullets during the attack and tried to cause an explosion with a propane tank he had hauled to the site.

Dear has openly admitted to the shooting since his first court appearance, but despite that, the case has languished in court for years as multiple times he’s been found incompetent to stand trial. He has been receiving treatment at the state mental hospital in Pueblo for nearly as long as he’s been in custody.

Starting Tuesday, reports Gazette news partner KKTV, a federal court will consider the medication question under the basis of the Supreme Court ruling in Sell v. United States (2003), which established a four-part test to determine whether or not it’s okay to order a defendant to be involuntarily medicated to stand trial. The judge will weigh the following during the two-day hearing:

1. Does the government have an important interest to bring this person to trial?

2. Medication must be medically beneficial to the person.

3. There can’t be other less intrusive means of treating the person.

4. Has to be a reasonable likelihood that the forced medication will return the person to competency.

Dear’s review hearing in the Fourth Judicial District Court in Colorado Springs, which was scheduled for early August, was pushed to Sept. 30 to accommodate the results of the medication hearing.

In September 2021, a judge ruled that Dear undergo treatment in a “suitable facility” after being repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial since proceedings began in his case.

Dear, 64, was first ruled incompetent to stand trial in Colorado Springs in 2016, after being diagnosed with a delusional disorder. At that time, a judge in the Fourth Judicial District said Dear’s understanding of things was “not rational” or “grounded in reality.” In 2020, that ruling was upheld by another judge in El Paso County.

Dear faces 179 counts in state courts for the 2015 attack on the clinic, which claimed the lives of three and injured nine others.

In 2019, a federal grand jury indicted him on 68 new counts in a bid to get Dear to trial.

Last September, Dear was again ruled unable to understand court proceedings or their consequences, stalling that effort to bring him to trial in federal court while Dear undergoes treatment.

Prosecutors at the state level have also tried numerous times to force medications on Dear.

Dear called himself “a warrior for the babies” during his first court appearance in December 2015 after the killings. He yelled over attorneys at least 15 times.

“I’m guilty — there’s no trial,” Dear said minutes into that initial hearing.

Robert Lewis Dear is accused of shooting three people to death and wounding nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs in 2015.

REUTERS file

Robert Dear was ruled incompetent to stand trial multiple times in 2018.